In an increasingly security-conscious world, protecting access to information and/or to systems from unwanted discovery and/or corruption is a major issue for both consumers and businesses. Many consumer or business systems may be vulnerable to unwanted access when the level of security provided within the system is not sufficient for providing the appropriate protection. In this regard, consumer systems, such as multimedia systems, for example, may require the use of integrated architectures that enable security management mechanisms for defining and administering user rights or privileges in order to provide the necessary protection from unwanted access.
An example of a multimedia system that may be accessed by many different users may be a set-top box where manufacturers, vendors, operators, and/or home users may have an interest in accessing at least some limited functionality of the system. In some instances, a single device, such as a security processor for example, may be utilized to administer security operations in the multimedia system. The security processor may operate independently of other components in the multimedia system when determining rights or privileges of different users to various features in the multimedia system. For example, vendors may have limited access to some of the functions that may be accessible by the manufacturer. Home users may only have access to a subset of the vendors' access rights. In some instances, secure operations may be managed by specifying, in a single location, secure conditions for each security component supported by the system.
However, there may be several limitations with such a straightforward implementation. On a typical security system, the number of user modes and security components may be sufficiently large that the size of the security management and/or control information may require large amounts of memory. There may be a significant number of access control entries that may correspond to instances when access rights may not be granted and/or instances when the access rights may be the same for multiple user modes and/or for multiple security components, such as default settings, for example. The addition or removal of user modes or security components may pose various implementation challenges, which increases hardware and/or software complexity. As software and/or hardware complexity increases, it may become more challenging to manage security operations without introducing security breaches or other concerns.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.